RadioShack in a classy move puts Customer Data up for sale in Bankruptcy Auction. But again, it is their property now. This I think is one of the things that’s going to take some time to get into the public consciousness and make people less likely to give out info, because companies can die, and you don’t know who’s going to loot the corpse.

Truly bizarre, Comcast can’t or won’t give a home in or near it’s area internet so the new homeowner, a work from home software developer, may have to sell it after owning it for only two months. a) Internet is a life’s blood now, get it? and b) telecoms monopolys like this are horrific and going to create new weirdly happed dark parts of cities.

As much as I want to believe, and own a few merch mugs from them to that point, Mars One is receiving a lot of criticism as it is supposed to be ramping up but not so much. The word “scam” is appearing. A little more time will tell. Sad but maybe not shocking if true.

Isreal’s Netanyahu is reelected for a fourth term. It’s weird to me how disconnected the lives we live can be. As soon as I stopped reading my news feeds I completely forgot/didn’t hear about how the election was going and what the results were. The news is two weeks old but reading through my cached feeds it was new to me. Maybe some people who still have cable tv and get the news or even news papers were up on this, but at the same time, it certainly wasn’t a point of conversation I heard about at all. Just hammers home how important it is to find some way to connect yourself to the news.

In another quiet step of the web continuing to divide and segregate Yahoo closes it’s last Chinese operation in Beijing. I see more and more “international” (read American, first and big) net companies pulling out of markets like China as native and national competitors pop up. This can be for many reasons, but it’s something to watch.

A new Steve Jobs documentary “depicts a man ‘utterly lacking in empathy'” which hi-lights a few of my problems with the cult-of-Jobs worship. Unlike other big tech company owners, most notably Bill Gates, Steve Jobs turned off all philanthropy at Apple when he came back in the 90s and never turned it back on even when they saw ridiculous profit. Personally he was the same. Reports of him being an unbelievably hostile and aggressive boss are rampant. But people want to emulate him. Because despite all that he made money and that appears to be what is most important?

On the other hand, if you read long enough, you find potential causes for hope like CO2 emissions from 2014 being the same as 2013 even with 3% world economy growth. We still need to wait a few years and a ton of other caveats, but maybe that is something.

The Hubble telescope watching aurora on Ganymede seems to have show indications of a massive underground ocean, deeper than Earth’s. I cannot wait till we can send probes to these watery moons and see if anything even more strange emerges or is hiding down there.

I already filter and or act as a lens for some things. I read. A lot. my goodreads is a testament to that, with a huge to read list (288 and counting) and about 30 books a year. I read a lot, and some of it’s pretty not good but some is. So I spit out the occasional recommendation for friends. And they appreciate not having to read all the other stuff I do to find the recommendations. A little less for tv but a bit similar. One thing that helps with that though is I have an audience in mind. Here I’m mostly talking to me and the web crawlers for now. Not sure who I should be picturing as I try to lens or filter for. We shall see. So!

The delightful CGP Grey released a new video: This Video Will Make You Angry – about memes and the modern web. Amazingly he pretty much avoids saying he is talking about memes while describing them, probably intentionally to try to sideload more. Very exclent.

Iran looking to legislate population growth by banning voluntary sterilization, reducing access to contraceptives. ‘Amnesty International, … saying the legislation would “reduce Iranian women to baby-making machines”‘. This is an interesting topic as a great many developed nations look at dwindling birth rates from Japan to Singapore to the US and Canada. There are a lot of solutions on the table and I think this is one of the least effective and most dangerous ones, more likely to undue development than promote a lot of growth.

Florida officials ban the term ‘climate change’. Another cunning move right up there with another state’s legislation disallowing sea-side building plans to adjust for potential climate induced sea level changes. These people will literally end up under water and throw people in jail for “noticing” it

Scotland Yard chief: Put CCTV In Every Home To Help Solve Crimes – I don’t even. As I’ll try to get to eventually, the problem is not at all the amount of data but what law enforcement does with it. There are already many cases of attacks happening from vectors they were watching but flubbed on because they don’t have the infrastructure to handle all that or the support and intelligence in place. Also the irony that the country that gave us 1984 would propose this is a little staggering. At least the UK parliament is exhibiting a clue: “Banning Tor is unacceptable and Technologically Impossible” in response to PM David Cameron’s call to ban all strong encryption (and commerce and banks and? – at best, this relies on the fallacy that you can have strong encryption AND a backdoor for just the good guys)

Starting 2015 off right by trying to blog more (what it’s March already?). Well, this is as good a place as any to start: Ellis on The Manfred Macx Media Diet from 2012. And then more recently from his newsletter Orbital Operations:

A few times a year, I compare my current practise against this website post I wrote in 2012, to see how I’m stacking up against it. It’s a consideration of a second of Charlie Stross’ near-future sf novel ACCELERANDO. I am quite aware that this is not a thing that normal people do. It is a no-win situation. Because one is comparing oneself and one’s practise to the broad strokes of a fiction. It’s an absurd thing to do to yourself.

But, for me, it’s a cognitive whetstone: it makes me think about the way I’m processing information. And, on what is probably a more vain plane, a way to think about thinking in public.

Everyone crying a video camera in their phone and easy access to viral social media is still catching a generation off guard. The latestish scandal is in Oklahoma where some students in a frat were caught on video which instantly went viral doing a racist chant. They were already kicked off campus by the university and now may face expulsion.

CGP Grey released an amazing video today: Humans Need Not Apply, which is basically about how we are now entering our second ecno-techno revolution (the first was with basic atomization and the doing away with a bunch of basic labour as humans and horses were replaced by brainless machinery) where by new smart bots are going to be replacing a whole lot of people in the work force and new high tech jobs are being created at a tiny tiny fraction of the rate of other jobs being destroyed. Paper napkin estimates could place job displacement/unemployment easily from 25% to 45% in the not to distant future. Don’t believe? Charlie Stross has been banging on for a while now about how self driving cars will fairly rapidly replace any other kind of cars which has second order effects like killing any kind of paid driver from limo to taxi to buy to trucker to heavy machinery like at mines to dump truck driver. And the same can be applied across just a shocking number of industries. Seriously though, just go watch the video.

Done? Ok. So maybe now it’s time to talk about Basic Income [or this interesting article] (again) yes? I think we need to just drop any kind of “but it’s supporting the freeloaders” style arguments. Already now I’d argue they aren’t worth your time because there is a lot of evidence in support of many socialist programs and safety nets that even though they do bleed into some of that, over all they are a boon to society as many “able bodied” and “hearty contributor” citizens are able to bounce back more rapidly (or at all). But that’s nothing compared to the fact that very soon half of all of us may be unemployed with more on the way. As CGP Grey mentioned, the Great Depression was at unemployment levels of a “mere” 25%. Anyone want to imagine the economic collapse we’d be facing at higher levels of rampant poverty and starvation and lack of ability to support yourself? If a quarter to half the population around these parts suddenly couldn’t get by? And this will be just about as bad for the other half still employed because they will be deriving their wealth from the economy, which, as we said, will be in free fall collapse. So basically everyone is doomed if that happens.

So again I say, Basic Income. Economy is pretty much defined as the velocity of the flow of money (I’m not an economist). We need people to have money to spend to keep it all working for the few people still “contributing” and extracting additional wealth that way. Also for the reason we don’t want everyone to starve to death in our robot utopia future. Finally we have gotten rid of scarcity and work and yet everyone is poor and starving except the robots and maybe the 1% (maybe)? Only humans…

There’s another effect of this though. Tax. Corporate tax to be exact. If the majority of people aren’t extracting wealth from the economy except in the form of Basic Income, then all the big gains will be made by corporations, that will now be “staffed” largely by robots. If those are the big and really only instruments of economic wealth generation, then that’s where all the tax will have to be extracted from to support all us humans. And hey, why not, because Corporations are people too now you know :)

More and more people are starting to think this way from Switzerland who is actually voting on it in a referendum soon, to The Expanse Series of books I just finished reading incorporating it, to more mentions in the news. I think we need to all start discussing and implementing it pretty quickly, for all our sakes. There is a wide range of ways to do it so lets try to skip over arguing about if and just move to how. We may be starting to run short on time.

Edit: And after posting this I learned about the vibrant community over at the sub-reddit r/BasicIncome so welcome to anyone there visiting, and anyone else? You should head over there and look at all the discussion. Reddit comments here.